THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY

By Alain de Botton Pantheon; 266 pages; $22.95 It's not often that an author single-handedly invents a genre, but Alain de Botton pulled the rabbit out of the hat in 1997 with "How Proust Can Change Your Life." That unlikely best-seller combined the toniest of topics, Marcel Proust, with the sort of books we might associate with Dr. Laura Schlessinger. The literary self-help book was born.

De Botton returns with "The Consolations of Philosophy," a manual that suggests that when we're lovelorn, we need Arthur Schopenhauer, and that when we're upset at not finding the remote control, Seneca may be the answer to our prayers. As the somewhat campy title taken from Boethius suggests, de Botton plays on the contrast between our daily troubles and the Great Names of history. Epicurus, after all, addressed the question "Can money buy happiness?" and Seneca was concerned with the tantrums of the Roman newly rich. ("Prosperity fosters bad tempers," he observed.)

Accordingly, de Botton sketches five difficulties and the ways esteemed thinkers resolved them. Think you're unpopular? Imagine what it was like to be Socrates, who was invited to drink poison. De Botton comments that painters who show Socrates expiring among grieving friends misrepresent the situation. The majority of Athenians were content to have him die, and far more apt paintings would have been "Five Jurors Playing Cards after a Day in Court" or "The Accusers Finishing Dinner and Looking Forward to Bed." Socrates faced such critics with aplomb, and de Botton shows us how.

Short on funds? Epicurus revealed that most things we buy are substitutes for more basic values, a point de Botton illustrates with a Bacardi ad. And if we're feeling inadequate, Montaigne counsels that all of us have our deficiencies. Some are just more adept at hiding them. As Montaigne memorably remarks, "Upon the highest throne in the world, we are seated, still, upon our arses."

Clearly, "The Consolations of Philosophy" is more entertaining than its self-help competitors. De Botton punctuates his text with dozens of illustrations, some incidental, others intrinsic to his point, all funny. He writes with an elegance philosophers might envy and provides the same cheap payback given by historical novels. We're painlessly instructed while we read for fun.

It helps that de Botton worms himself into the work, alternately instructing and presenting himself as hapless example. He is deathly afraid of being unpopular, longs to own mansions beyond his means, swears when the road is blocked or the restaurant full and identifies with lovelorn teenagers who "swoon by moonlight and sob beneath bedclothes."

In fact, de Botton began his career writing novels about love, so it is with particularly wry amusement that he offers Schopenhauer's consolation for a broken heart. That brooding philosopher believed that we are attracted to our opposites (and thereby virtually guaranteed disappointment) because we are secretly seeking a co- parent for the next generation and need someone different to compensate for our defects.

De Botton repudiates skeptics who might claim, "The continuation of the species is seldom in our minds when we ask for a phone number," and shows how we too can mend a broken heart through careful application of Schopenhauerian principles.

De Botton comes most alive in the chapter on Nietzsche, visiting the latter's room near St. Moritz and climbing an adjacent Alp. Although de Botton is fully aware of the philosopher's more humorous aspects (that mustache!), Nietzsche comes as a climactic figure because he rejected consolations altogether, considering them a palliative or an excuse not to keep struggling.

"No pain, no gain" might have been his motto, and in Nietzsche's view consolations were consolation prizes, a substitute for not coming in first. De Botton, who once titled a chapter "How to Suffer Successfully," demonstrates that nobody did this better than Nietzsche.

Ordinarily we wouldn't expect a work written so tongue-in-cheek to pass muster in a philosophy class. De Botton, though, is the highly intelligent director of the graduate philosophy program at London University. He is limited by his quota of 250 pages, but his portraits are astute and accurate enough, if occasionally questionable. Knowledgeable readers will lift their eyebrows when they discover that he eliminates everybody's metaphysics (a sizable omission when it comes to Socrates and Schopenhauer), but this is a pop book, and the average reader will just feel relief.

Beyond that, it's worth observing that much of the advice offered by present-day gurus was distilled several centuries ago by masters of the genre. So, after traversing Melody Beattie, Stephen Covey, John Gray and Marianne Williamson, we can turn to the pros. Yet the traversal works both ways. Many people mock these modern counselors, but de Botton shows that their profession was once regarded as among the noblest, and implicitly he suggests that the self-help shelf at the bookstore may just harbor classics of the future.